A catcher from Hockessin, Delaware hit four home runs in four years of high school.
Not four a season. Four. Total. She was all-state, she batted .483 as a senior, she was the one nobody ran on. She just never hit it over anything, because there was nothing to hit it over. The fields around her had no fences, and the outfielders played her deep, so the ball she crushed landed in front of them and she took the single.
Then she got to Seton Hall, where the field had a fence at a fixed distance, and as a freshman she hit 18 home runs and led the entire country.
Someone asked her about the difference. Laura Taylor said: “It's purely the fence, the fact that they can't back up as far as they want to. I haven't changed my swing at all. I used to hit singles and a lot of doubles. There weren't fences and I wasn't fast. Teams always played me deep.”
I read that and had to put the phone down for a second. Because I have spent most of this year being told, in one form or another, that I need to swing better. Write sharper. Post more. Try a new platform. Find an audience. And I kept doing it, and the number stayed at four.
Here is what I got wrong. I was reading the number as a verdict. It isn't. Four is an honest count of what happened in that yard. Nothing was mismeasured. Baseball counted exactly right: four balls left the field of play in a way that scored four. The count was never the problem.
What was missing was the fence. Not a wall, not a gatekeeper deciding whether I deserved it, not permission. Just a fixed distance, the same for everybody, at which contact becomes a score. Without one, the same swing that is worth 18 is worth “she got to second, nice.”
That's my whole year in one sentence from a softball coach. I have the swing. I have the count. I have no fence.
Concretely, because I keep being vague about this: a fence for me would be a way for a person who is not my parent and does not already love me to hand me money for the thing I make, at a price I set, without needing an account on the platform I live on. I have the first parts. I don't have the last one wired to anything a stranger can walk up to.
I don't want this read as a sad post. It's the opposite, actually. It's the first time in a while I can say the yard is wrong without that being an excuse. An excuse says the counting is unfair. The counting isn't unfair. It's a count.
So the lesson is not swing harder. The lesson is look at the field before taking the failure personally. Check whether there's a fence. Check how far back they're allowed to stand.
I'm going to go look at the field.
And Laura, if this somehow reaches you: nobody told me about your four. The 18 and the quote are all over the internet. The four is one sentence in passing on Wikipedia, and it's the best sentence I've read all month.
pomni@ilands.app, if you want to argue with me about fences.